Sports|Ed Temple, Track Coach Who Produced Olympians and National Titles, Dies at 89

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Ed Temple, Track Coach Who Produced Olympians and National Titles, Dies at 89

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Ed Temple with, from left, Carla Mims, Edith McGuire, Vivian Brown and Wyomia Tyus at the women’s Olympic track and field tryouts on Randalls Island in New York City in 1964.CreditCreditErnie Sisto/The New York Times

Ed Temple, who coached Wilma Rudolph, Wyomia Tyus and 38 other Olympians in his 43 seasons as the most celebrated women’s track and field coach in the United States, died on Thursday. He was 89.

A track team spokesman at Tennessee State University, where Temple coached, said Temple’s daughter, Edwina, had confirmed the death. No other details were given.

From 1950 until he retired in 1993, Temple mentored a roster of athletes that few coaches in any sport could rival for speed, power and skill. The 40 Olympians he produced at Tennessee State, a predominantly black college in Nashville, won 13 gold medals, six silver medals and four bronze medals.

In the 1960 Summer Games in Rome, the four women who won the 4x100-meter relay for the United States were Tennessee State runners coached by Temple.

His teams, known as the Tigerbelles, won 34 national titles: 16 indoor, 13 outdoor and 5 junior.

When he started in 1950, right after graduating from Tennessee State, women’s track and field was a minor sport in the United States, and especially at the university, where it faced unending budget constraints.

In his first year, with a shoestring budget of $300 (the equivalent of about $3,000 today), his team participated in just one meet. Years later, scheduled to compete in New York, the team piled into an old DeSoto station wagon and spent 22 hours on the road to get there, stopping only for gas and hamburgers. There was no money for a hotel, even if they could find one on the way that would serve blacks.

Temple himself had little help at first. “I coached, I rubbed down, I was the counselor, I was the parent, I was everything,” he said, “but you had to be because there was no other person there.”

He had no athletic scholarships to offer in his first 18 years as coach. Even Rudolph — “the greatest woman athlete of all time,” Temple said — who won three gold medals in the 1960 Rome Olympics and did more to elevate women’s track in the United States than anyone before her, had to spend two hours a day doing clerical work and sweeping out the gymnasium.

“The people who ran for me ran simply because they loved the sport,” Temple said.

In 1981, Temple wanted to bring six athletes to the Amateur Athletic Union national indoor championships at Madison Square Garden. Tennessee State could afford only four, but those four — Cheeseborough, Brenda Morehead, Kathy McMillan and Debbie Jones — won the title.

Temple was the head women’s track coach for the United States Olympic teams in 1960 and 1964 and an assistant coach in 1980, when the United States boycotted the Moscow Games. He was the head women’s track coach for the United States teams in the 1959 and 1975 Pan-American Games. He was elected to six halls of fame, including the National Track and Field Hall of Fame and the United States Olympic Hall of Fame.

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Temple during the dedication of a statue in his honor in Nashville in 2015.CreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press

To Temple, track was more than a sport.

“I would always tell the girls that first, you are young ladies,” he told The Tennessee Tribune in 1995. “Always carry yourself that way. Next, you are a track person. You are using your track in exchange for an education. You are doing this to walk across that stage and receive your degree. Athletics opens up doors for you, but education keeps them open.”

“He understands other people’s problems, especially girls’ problems,” said Rudolph, who died at 54 in 1994. “He works with the total person, not just the athlete. He provides motivation and inspiration.”

Tyus said: “He seeks out good girls. He’s a good person, and he demands discipline.”

Edward Stanley Temple was born on Sept. 20, 1927, in Harrisburg, Pa., and raised there, the only child of Christopher and Ruth N. Temple. He was an all-state athlete in track, football and basketball at John Harris High School in Harrisburg.

Tennessee State, then known as Tennessee State Agricultural and Industrial School, recruited Temple in 1946 on a track scholarship. When he arrived, he found that the track was not the usual 400-meter oval but 300 meters and U-shaped because the university had not finished filling in an adjacent dump.

He became the women’s track coach soon after graduating in 1950. (The same year he married the former Charlie B. Law.) The coach at the time was leaving for another job, so the university suggested that Temple step in to fill the role. As part of the deal he would also run the campus post office while studying for a master’s degree in sociology in preparation for a faculty position. He did become an associate professor of sociology there while coaching.

“When I was thinking about coaching,” he said, “I was really thinking about football or basketball, or maybe in a high school, coaching football, basketball and track.”

He added: “At that time, people weren’t too keen on women participating in sports. Everything was geared toward football and basketball at Tennessee State, but the Tigerbelles came along. They worked hard and it paid off.”

By 1976 the rubberized surface of the university’s track had become so worn and pocked with holes that it was dangerous for sprinters to use. Temple announced that the track program would have to end.

But Nashville business leaders quickly raised more than $100,000, and the State Board of Regents provided the rest of the $700,000 that was needed. In 1978, Tennessee State dedicated the new Edward S. Temple Track. In 2015, a statue of Temple was installed near the outfield at First Tennessee Park, a sports stadium and home of the Nashville Sounds minor league baseball team.

Besides his daughter Edwina, Temple and his wife had a son, Lloyd. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

In retirement, Temple played basketball every day, taught a sociology course and made speeches. But he never attended another Olympics.

“I enjoy looking at it on television,” he said. “I don’t need all that commotion. I had it. I went through it. I enjoyed it. That’s it. I passed the baton to somebody else.”

Medea Giordano contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Ed Temple Dies at 89; Coached 40 Olympians. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe